Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

November 30, 2009

Well a little Internet sleuthing jut saved CityHarvest from quickly losing my year-end contribution. When I saw this ad I couldn't believe the waste involved in creating such a bad ad. However while they've lost me on their ad strategy they haven't lost me as a contributor since according to Shoot the apples are all computer rendered.

Thought I would post it so everyone could see the nice cover which is about as close as we will get to reading it. The book is $85 for the 150+ page hardcover edition. Granted it is small point type so it could be like 225 pages. But still. He explained it was priced this way because it is being sold to research libraries and others who have to have it. What was the point of forcing him to have a keyword friendly title if no one other than an institution is going to buy it? But what gets me riled up is that his publisher is only giving him a discount that brings his copies to abut $45. Really shouldn't they be giving it to him for something a lot closer to the printing costs?

For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

2009 has been a big year for Charles Darwin as it marks his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the release of On the Origin Of Species. He’s been getting a lot of attention in the science community this year and now a literary minded group of musicians have decided to pay tribute in their own creative way. Darwin’s work was the November book for the Bushwick Book Club, a Brooklyn-based group that meets monthly to play songs inspired by the chosen piece of literature.

November 27, 2009

Am glad Tiger is okay. Obviously want to know what happened but also interesting to know that his house is worth about as much as some brownstones up the street, in the exclusive gated-community of Park Slope.

November 26, 2009

An advertising man turned novelty-book packager, Mr. Hunt was almost single-handedly responsible for the postwar revival of the pop-up book in the United States. For decades the country’s leading producer of the books, he is widely credited with having taken a long dormant, long marginalized and long unprofitable publishing genre and making it a thriving, ubiquitous industry.

At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place. (This person compared this moment to Gutenberg, which might be a little bit far afield but not that far off!) That is that Joshua Micah Marshall is hiring a publisher for Talking Points Memo, the blog he started all on his own in 2000, a bit before all the warbloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds came onto the Internet, and four years before Michelle Malkin. (Oh yes, how soon we forget.) My friend's point was: here is an editor, who built and owns his publication, who is now going to be the editor-owner, who will employ the publisher. For those of you who have worked at any sort of publication, the implications of this are staggering

November 25, 2009

This morning I asked Willa what she wanted for breakfast and she said macaroni cheese pancakes. She also wanted a pink cupcake but lines have to be drawn somewhere. I'd heard that they had them at Shopsin's which sadly I've never been too. But thanks to the internets I can now feed her this fine combination.

How many cupcakes do you have to sell to pay the rent? And are cupcakes a viable business? These are still very early days in the Great Cupcake Rush, but the answers appear to be, respectively, a lot and maybe.

November 24, 2009

At Six Apart we have a long history of developing leading class open source applications and supporting developers who contribute to the open source community. Our latest community microblogging application, TypePad Motion, has been extremely well received since its launch over a month ago. As these communities have grown around TypePad, so has their need for better community management and social integration. Our members have given great feedback on features and improvements they would like to see, and we've listened!

November 22, 2009

A blogger isn't just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn't exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.

Mr. Dash wondered: Could WhiteHouse.gov be the next iPhone? Could developers get just as giddy over coding software to serve their country as they are over creating an app for the Apple store?
He’s about to find out.
Soon after he wrote his post, Mr. Dash received emails and calls from those “digital natives” in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, asking him if he’d like to help. They eventually approached him with an opportunity to lead a new Washington, D.C., incubator called Expert Labs. He got the job in early October.

A few years ago, my friend Andrew had an idea that he could create a new game. He created prototypes, held countless play parties, and refined it. Carrying on, he found a designer, a printer, convinced his wife to let him dig into savings, got people to preorder - and is now the owner of lots of boxed sets of Anomia. I got mine yesterday and it looks great.

The game is sort of a cross between war, trivial pursuit and a game called Set that my eight year old nephew kicked my ass at. The photo above of the uncut sheets shows a bit of detail. You flip[ cards then when you match the pattern the players need to yell out the item listed; detergent vs. biblical prophets, Japanese Monster movies against operas. It's fun. I have deep admiration that he brought this to fruition. Though he has sold a lot through preorder, he has some other copies to sell so check them out at Anomia Press.